Is the Stuff You Buy Over 20 Years Worth 40,000 Hours of Time?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'd say the easiest hack would be: stop signalling. You're not your fucking Babushka dolls or Banksy print. You're not the coffee style you drink or the coffee shop you drink it in. No one gets you by seeing what clothing you're wearing, and anyone who is attracted to you because of those things will be toxic company.
Yes, being in a particular place is a signal. But if you wear a Tommy Bahama shirt and khakis to a BDSM party you are probably not going to get attention.
Home decor is another point - if you want it to be a comfortable home and nothing else, great! Do whatever you like. But if you want the space to act as an occasional community center for you and your social group, signals help. There aren't many fancy 50 year old wine parties in basement apartments.
We are social beings, and we have a lot of unconscious decisions made via interpretation of such signs.
You can't just say someone who noticed you because you had some cool Vans shoes, is toxic because that someone used his senses and made a judgment - that maybe you are a cool approachable dude. No one likes you because of what you buy - that's not how it works.
Some people really are that vapid. Anecdotes aren't worth much in this space but a lot of people I know are recreational shoppers and the extent of their conversational capacity is places they've dined at, things they have and shit they like.
Now, maybe most people don't mind that sort of person. I don't think it would be uncharitable to call me a misanthropic arsehole. But I enjoy people who can think creatively, have even just an interest - not necessarily foundational knowledge - in science, history, politics, economics, engineering, and technology. To know whether someone is interested in these things does require some knowledge signalling - but that's not what we're talking about here.
We're talking about stuff you buy, and I was suggesting that anything used almost exclusively for signalling which lacks utility should be toned down if you don't want to be a slave to your possessions. Someone interested in astronomy might have a reflector telescope in their living room - it has utility and indirectly signals what they like, which is fine. Someone who likes eating but has never cooked a meal in their life and surrounds themselves with celebrity cookware and stylised kitchen appliances should consider just saving money for eating out - the return on investment will be greater.
They don't play sport - maybe they did back at college but the drinking aspect of being in a team was just as important as athleticism. But now sport is something they watch and talk about. Not something they do.
In the office or at a party where they don't know people, they find other sport talkers. If you don't sport, you get kind of shut out of these conversations because the up to date body of knowledge needed in order to have something to say requires more effort to maintain than you would want to put in unless you were genuinely interested.
And I'm not. That's fine.
Instead, I'd talk to my friends about economics or tech. If I was at an awkward party and found a guy who could talk with nuance about 20th century Korean history I'd just found a new friend.
I felt honestly superior to these sport people.
I don't do politics though. I don't make history. And economics is like the weather only less predictable.
It's the same thing. People talking about stuff they don't do. Neutral ground where opinions seem important but don't really matter where you can dance to show cultural fit, intellect, negotiation skill, and signal the way you think of your conversation partners.
Hockey and football are different games, and if you want the social and emotional rewards of being in your local amateur team you had better pick one and practice it. if you view it as networking, then you'll meet different kinds of people in different types of sport team. Better learn golf if you want to meet that sort of folk.
Some people talk about stuff they do. Everyone goes shopping. Most people go to work, bring up kids, repair thier houses.
It's not so abstract but in a way, those conversations matter more. You can tell because liking the wrong team gets you teased, but the wrong opinion about child rearing could lose you a good friend.
If you think about it, looking down on talking about what we actually do is more a judgment on how lame that stuff is. In sure if you were talking to someone with a truly interesting life it would be fine. How interesting are we though?
It's kind of a pointless question. There's value in gaining and sharing knowledge that allows you to analyse and interpret the machinations world so that you can make educated decisions rather than be blindly subjected to change. There is objective value in understanding human history, economic basics, biology, nutritional health etc compared to who kicked a goal in 1987. Who you're interesting to depends on preference.
Someone who is too busy thinking about football than the cons of buying a house in a floodplain will probably suffer from their ignorance. If we're to evolve as a species we need to be highly considerate and take an interest in the world around us.
It's naive to believe there exist people that don't judge humans and places by aesthetics. We just have different parameters.
Maybe Babushka dolls don't represent the aesthetics you like, but refusing to signal entirely isn't the path to less toxic relationships; it's the path to being alone in your bubble.
You can still talk to people and you can both gauge each other based on personality and topics of interest. In fact you'll find more people of interest by talking to them rather than filtering by outward appearance. I'd argue you remain in a relative mono-culture or bubble by filtering via aesthetics.
We might have differing opinions due to circumstance - I live in an inner city suburb and work in an office of ~700 people, so you're having conversations with a lot of people whether you like it or not. I can understand this might be different if someone lived a in a rural area where aesthetics means someone can trust that you're a local and can use aesthetics as a short cut to kick off a conversation. But even suburban life allows us to graduate from using the shit we buy as a way of defining us to what we do and say.
...at the cost of time/effort. Of course you'll find more people by removing a filter that isn't 100% correct; you'll just find more noise too.
I've never understood "don't judge a book by its cover"; the alternative is to read every single book? If your metric is decent (and being corrected over time), then judging should drastically refuce your rate of false positives. Assuming the 90% rule, finite time, and sufficient resources that even with lots of false negatives there'll still be enough books (or otherwise) for you to go through; then not judging by the cover is a massive inefficiency.
You're just doing a naive brute force search by not filtering by the cover.
The problem occurs when your policy is strict, not that it exists.
And its pretty difficult to imagine that aesthetics aren't a useful signal to watch for, unless you simply aren't paying attention; very few communities don't construct their own slang, attire, quirks and what-nots. Even long-standing groups of two or three will do so. And few are skilled at hiding it. So you can get at least some indication of a person's background and interests based off their behavior and clothing; they question is if you can get enough information to construct a useful filter from, and that's partially dependent on your own awareness of various cultures, your ability to detect and the actual information available from this signal.
Rubbish. Unless you work from home and aren't forced to engage with dozens of people each day, which is what most people who work in cities (and by virtue make up a considerable portion of the population) do, then filtering by discussion is a lot easier than striking up a conversation with every person who wears shit that jives to your sensibilities or sips on something you think is hip.
One simply cannot talk to everyone. Gotta have some way to do an initial sorting. Sure, it might be petty most times, but it is better than nothing. I'd just advise folks go out of their comfort zone more often and ask folks about things they find different or strange.
I've seen several people buy Hyena Agenda[1] shirts specifically to find other furries out in the wild without being overt about it to non-furries (most furry apparel is obviously furry, while this company sells a lot of less obvious stuff). Furries are majority LGBTQ nerds by a wide margin, so it's a great filter.
That includes enjoying your cup of coffee. If you genuinely can't taste the difference, don't buy it. But if you do, then buy good coffee.
Adding small, every day joys that you savior to your life is worth your money (and time).
Perhaps I should have been more clear about signalling. I'm not suggesting you remove the small pleasures from your life. If something has utility (including pleasure) and the capacity to signal, then go nuts. Consider it a bonus.
Another thing I see is the once people have accumulated things they don't want or actually need or the product has no utility after several years, I find people unable to let go off those stuff, and instead keep storing more and more and more.
Now imagine that being done over 25 years, and then I realised that's the home I'm living in with my parents.
One or two simple rules can help, however. Rarely buy what's generally coveted, never buy any product that's advertised, and do not hang out with those who do.
The simplest rule: Buy tools i.e. anything that can be used to create or modify something. A knife is a tool, a (functional) camera is a tool, a microwave is a tool, a couch is a tool, a bed is a tool, a computer is a tool.
And as Dave Ramsey said, "We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like."
I like your "stop signaling" rule. That's really the root of the waste, and not many of us mix in circles where the spending is expected.
If you compare all of the work to all of the stuff, then there's no way to notice (within that framework) if the best answer was to work part-time, or slightly less overtime, or slightly more overtime.
Thus proving most workers (as in >90%) do not have that choice.
For Example (Easy numbers used for math):
Stupid Random Thing I want to Impulse Buy is $400.00 At $10/hour, this object costs me 40 hours. Is it worth a week's work to have Random Thing I want to Impulse buy?
If 40 hours of work = Object's value to me, then buy Else, pass- and save money for future endeavor
A lot of it is worth it. Some of it is not. Time is not the only thing of import in this life, just ask any prisoner living a life sentence if he thinks he's lucky for having all that extra time.
I buy stuff as life enhancers. It keeps my mind stimulated or body healthy when I get a new macbook or a mountain bike.
I also try to buy durable stuff BIFL type stuff. So that the value is massive, and will possibly be passed on after I'm dead.
I think it's less about the abstract term 'stuff' and more about the idea of 'value' that 40000 hours of your life provides to yourself and your family/friends.
The goal of just accumulating 'stuff' is consumerism...the goal of accumulating 'value' in your life if a better pursuit imo.
The sad fact is that if I stop working, I can only survive for maybe six months until I need to start working again. I don't like having to give half of my life over to someone else, but I haven't happened upon a better alternative yet.
I don't see how such a term can be used consistently in a meaningful way as entities like an actual physical thing and the memory of an encounter are vastly different things on a conceptual level.
[Life] = ( [Stuff] || [NoStuff] )